She’s got a great set of legs and never leaves the house without her signature White Diamond by Elizabeth Taylor perfume, a flower in her hair and an outfit with a plunging neckline barely concealing a chest measuring 38DD. This is not a woman who minds standing out in a crowd.

Writer Pat Andres noticed her in church at Asbury Memorial United Methodist on Henry Street. Both women like to sit toward the back – Pat because she has bronchitis and can get out when she starts coughing, Crystal because she likes to leave when she wants to leave. Pat noticed the flowers in Crystal’s red hair, Crystal liked the way Pat sang the hymns.

Crystal, who used to live on 33rd Street, doesn’t really remember how she started going to Asbury. She didn’t know anything about the church except that it was down the street and “something guided me into it.” Pat’s husband sings in the choir.

One Sunday morning Pat, who is curious about people and notices things and loves to read biographies, turned to the flamboyant Crystal and said, “You look like you’ve lived an interesting life, a risky but interesting life.”

Crystal laughed and said, “Maybe.” That’s when Pat, who is a writer, gave Crystal her card and said, “We should write your story.”

The two women couldn’t have been a more unlikely pair, not because Pat, who just turned 75, can’t write. She can. But two out of her earlier stories are children’s books about animals: “Maggie, a Savannah Dog,” a tale about a much-loved and well-known Boston Terrier, and, most recently, “Roseanna, a Savannah Squirrel,” about an albino squirrel that lives in Pat’s yard, a book she ironically dedicates to “all those who are different.” Her third book, “Love from the Ashes,” is a romance novella about someone who comes back from the dead.

Crystal, who is 53, was born Robert. Crystal is a transgender person.

The two women met. They talked. They met again. And they kept talking.

Last month, the book — “It’s Hard to be Crystal, Life in the Tranny Lane” — came out. Crystal, Pat writes, looks “like a guy in a dress wearing stage make-up.” Crystal, Pat learned, knew from the get-go she was not comfortable in her body. She preferred her sister’s Barbie dolls to her own G.I. Joes. She preferred the hair salon to the barbershop. She liked wearing girls’ underclothes. By the time she was 8 she knew she wanted to be a girl. Still, as a boy she dated girls but she never asked them out. The transition was not to happen overnight. She fought her mother. She fought her father. She fought her body.

She fought society’s expectations. When a woman she was dating suggested marriage she went along with it, not wanting to hurt the woman’s feelings. Crystal was 27. It did not last long, but when they broke up the two people continued living together, “as friends, as sisters.”

The former wife finally married someone else. Now, her eyebrows thin and shapely, her lipstick perfect and her fingernails red, Crystal’s outside appearance is starting to match up with her inside identity.

The day she got breast implants — “my saline twins” — was the happiest day of her life. That was exactly eight years ago, Crystal said, with a big smile. The rest of the procedure, known medically as sex reassignment surgery, will happen when she can save up enough money.

The project for Pat has been a huge learning curve.

“You better believe it,” she said. “I’ve lived a sheltered life, married for 55 years to the only man I’ve ever been with. Most of us have no idea (about this world) but I’ve always believed everybody’s got a story. I have learned a whole lot.”

Still, in their own way the two women share a spirit of rebellion. They were insubordinate. They were combative. Crystal, as Robert, was always getting in trouble with the police, with teachers, with her parents. Pat, who worked for nearly 30 years in social services — 18 at the Department of Family and Children Services and 10 in private foster care — had her own battles.

“Not unusual for someone who graduated from high school in 1955 when all you could be was a teacher or a nurse,” she said. “In high school my counselor said, ‘I hope you never work with people.’ My family couldn’t afford college so I was a hairdresser for years. At 36 I went to college. At 40 I started working. I was a rebel. My father, father-in- law and brother were cops. I was against the Vietnam War. I marched. My family thought I was a communist.”

Now the two are business partners.

“I got big compliments at Club One,” Crystal told Pat during a recent meeting. “I gave one to Lady Chablis.”

“But did you sell any books?” Pat asked.

Later, Crystal got on her bike — in 40 degree weather, legs wrapped in tights, a wide belt circling her waist, a pink ribbon in her hair — to do some chores.